tea.mathoverflow.net - Discussion Feed (Confused grad student questions.)

Harry Gindi comments on "Confused grad student questions." (1342)

Harry Gindi — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 17:29:32 -0800

To clarify, I meant that we should cater to people with mathematical knowledge and maturity.

Ben Webster comments on "Confused grad student questions." (1341)

Ben Webster — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 17:17:05 -0800

Harry, fedja- This is not really a productive discussion, so i hope we can all agree to end it. It sounds to me like you are talking past each other. I don't care if a question is written by a dog, if it is good, so let's not have any discussion of who we should have on MO, but what we want on the site. But certainly good writing is part of what we want on the site, and it's important that Q-and-A writers understand this, especially if they want good feedback.

fedja comments on "Confused grad student questions." (1337)

fedja — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 14:37:33 -0800

I see. We just use different definitions of "interesting". This word has at least 3 different meanings in the situation when A asks, B answers, and C votes on the discussion and it is impossible to reconcile them. Translated into plain English, what you and Harry mean seems to be "you should ask your question in such a way that we recognize you as a mature mathematician; the content is not so important (within limits, of course)". My attitude is normally quite the opposite: "I do not care who you are and why and how you ask, but I look at the content of your problem. If it makes sense and is non-trivial, I'll try to think of it". Keeping top rate mathematicians on the site should be the highest priority, no question about that, but the only people who know what to keeps them here for sure are themselves. Why don't we ask them what they think of MO and why they come here? It may make quite an interesting discussion on meta.

Harry Gindi comments on "Confused grad student questions." (1335)

Harry Gindi — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 13:23:52 -0800

Exactly my point, fedja. I think that MO should be restricted to people who have at least some mathematical knowledge and maturity.

Anton Geraschenko comments on "Confused grad student questions." (1333)

Anton Geraschenko — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 13:16:53 -0800

@fedja: I assume your last comment is directed entirely at Harry and not at me, but just in case, let me clarify. I have no problem with non-mathematicians on MO, so long as they play by the rules. Namely, they should ask questions that the community finds interesting. A question does not need to be hard in order to be interesting. In fact, MO is very much meant to help resolve problems that somebody probably knows the answer to off they top of their head.

fedja comments on "Confused grad student questions." (1330)

fedja — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 13:03:33 -0800

Allow me to humbly disagree about engineers. I do not know what experience you had with them, but those whom I communicated with had genuine math. questions (some of them next to trivial, some of them beyond my abilities to answer, but all of them clearly in the realm of math.) Yes, there exists people who are "calculators with brains" in every scientific profession and I will even dare to claim that there exist some who are "calculators without brains", but many of them just lack mathematical knowledge, not intelligence.

Anton Geraschenko comments on "Confused grad student questions." (1321)

Anton Geraschenko — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 12:32:51 -0800

@fedja: Yes, I seriously mean that, but I think you're misunderstanding what I mean by those words. If somebody is stuck on something, I don't think he should post to MO, "I'm stuck while trying to do X, how do I get unstuck?" That is the real question he's trying to solve, clearly stated, but it's a boring one. Instead, he should ask himself "why do I want to do X?" and "why might somebody else want to do X?" The answers he comes up with should go into his question as "background and motivation". Moreover, he should break X down into smaller problems if possible. Perhaps accomplishing X is a matter of doing Y and Z. Actually, maybe he can already do Z, so he just needs to figure out how to do Y. But really Y might have a natural generalization W which is probably interesting by itself. After going through this process of breaking down and recontextualizing the problem, he can post an interesting question: "Is W true?" or, depending on what W is, "Is there an example of (not W)?" Explaining that he's trying to do X and that he thinks proving W is the right way to do it should also go under "background and motivation" if it's not too far removed.

I don't think the we should tolerate questions that offend the sensibilities of members of the community. MO is not meant to be a way for non-mathematicians to get better access to mathematicians; it's meant to be a way for mathematicians to get better access to each other. I agree that there's a place for PR, but I'm far more concerned with keeping mathematicians interested in visiting the site than I am with making the site friendly to non-mathematicians.

Harry Gindi comments on "Confused grad student questions." (1319)

Harry Gindi — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 12:04:41 -0800

Engineers don't belong on mathoverflow. Applied math questions are a different story, but many of them tend to be questionable.

fedja comments on "Confused grad student questions." (1318)

fedja — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 11:44:45 -0800

Anton, do you seriously mean that a confused student should provide "background and motivation" and try to "make the question more interesting"? In my opinion, he should just ask the question as clearly as he can. And no, a routine question about some classical stuff won't become more interesting if you ask it in some fancy way.

Having said that, I also strongly believe that we *should* try to answer such questions, as well as questions of engineers, applied math. people, etc. however trivial and non-interesting (or even ill-posed) they may seem to us. If somebody struggles with the problem and you can give him a hand, why wouldn't you?

futurebird comments on "Confused grad student questions." (1317)

futurebird — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 06:55:00 -0800

Thanks for these responses I'll keep them in mind as I craft questions.

Anton Geraschenko comments on "Confused grad student questions." (1314)

Anton Geraschenko — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 03:46:10 -0800

MO is very much meant to handle those sorts of questions. You shouldn't feel bad about them or believe that you need to tag them in a special way so that others can ignore them. But you should try to provide some background and motivation and make the question interesting to others. The thread Harry pointed to is a good example of how to take some bit of a proof you're stuck on and turn it into a question that has much more appeal than "Help me work through this proof".

I hope to have a preliminary draft of a guide to asking good questions up soon. The basic idea is that asking a question on MO should be an extension of how you normally solve problems in mathematics. Suppose you're studying for quals and you hit a snag; either you don't understand a result or you don't know how to do a problem. Try to break your problem down into smaller pieces ("if there's a problem you can't solve, there's a simpler one you can't solve") and ask it to yourself from different points of view (e.g. instead of asking, "where does the proof use X?" try "is the result true without X?"; instead of trying to prove a result, look for counterexamples). Chances are that you'll either resolve your problem (great!) or reduce it to a question that is interesting by itself which you can post on MO (in the case Harry linked to, "Is every left fibration of simplicial sets a trivial Kan fibration?").

Ilya Nikokoshev comments on "Confused grad student questions." (1313)

Ilya Nikokoshev — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 03:44:55 -0800

I think you're much be better thinking about a couple of specific questions than trying to guess in advance whether they will be appropriate. Then search on MO to see whether there has been something similar in spirit. If you don't find, just post and let the community express its opinion.

Since you are unsure, invest a bit more into writing correctly, putting links, using good structure. And say you've already read Wikipedia and did Google. That dramatically highers the chances people will like your question.

David Zureick-Brown comments on "Confused grad student questions." (1309)

David Zureick-Brown — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 18:50:38 -0800

My opinion is that as long as you put in the time to make them good questions (try browsing the closed questions to get a sense of what is not good), they are appropriate for the site. I think Critch's question http://mathoverflow.net/questions/2985/derived-functors-vs-universal-delta-functors is a good example.

Harry Gindi comments on "Confused grad student questions." (1306)

Harry Gindi — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 17:09:17 -0800

http://tea.mathoverflow.net/discussion/118/appropriate-place-to-ask-these-types-of-questions/

I hope this answers your question.

futurebird comments on "Confused grad student questions." (1305)

futurebird — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 17:01:04 -0800

Most homework help sites are too basic for the questions I have. I don't have questions about homework anyway... It is more conceptual. If someone can answer my question they are almost as confused as I am. Most of the time no one responds. But, I think my questions might be boring to folks here since they are related to prep for quals and early grad school classes. So, I'm still searching for the best place for my questions.

I have a lot of studying to do on my own and it is hard to know if I'm making progress when I have no one to talk to!

It would be really great if there were a "clarification" tag for people who want to ask for help understanding concepts and proofs that are known. And that way anyone who would be bored by such questions could ignore them. I don't know if this is the slippery slope to "homework help" --I think it could be "interesting to mathematicians" or maybe that's just wishful thinking since I really want to ask questions to people who know this stuff-- there's just so much I don't understand.